Author: Marianne Freiberger

Helen Joyce is a former editor of Plus magazine who now works as a journalist for The Economist. In August she's off to Brazil to be the paper's Brazil Bureau Chief. In between packing and learning Portuguese she has found time to tell Plus all about her varied career and the role maths has played in it.

One advantage of the UK voting system is that nobody could possibly fail to understand how it works. However, the disadvantages are well-known. Differently sized constituencies mean that the party in government doesn't necessarily have the largest share of the vote. The first-past-the-post system turns the election into a two-horse race, which leaves swathes of the population un-represented, forces tactical voting, and turns election campaigns into mud-slinging contests.

There are many alternative voting systems, but is there a perfect one? The answer, in a mathematical sense, is no.

Genomics is one of the fastest moving areas of science and Gavin Harper, a mathematician and statistician, has put himself right at its centre. He works for Oxford Nanopore Technologies, a company which is developing new technology for analysing molecules and sequencing DNA. With 75 employees from 18 different countries and all sorts of scientific backgrounds, Gavin's work environment is
nothing like the solitary paper-and-pencil affair traditionally associated with mathematics.